24 teams gathered on Saturday 28th September at the John Warner School for the very first VEX V5RC regional of the season.
VEX robotics is a program where students get to work with parts to build and program a robot to compete at competitions on a regional, national and even international level.
There are different age categories, and the game changes each year to create new challenges to be solved by the teams.
This year’s game is named ‘High Stakes’, and the primary objective is to score rings on mobile goals.
However, as the title suggests, there are ways to dramatically swing the points: mobile goals full of rings can be placed in positive and negative corners, to either double or negate a team’s score: as such, tactics are extremely important.
For all the teams present, this was the first opportunity to qualify for the national championship, held in Telford at the end of February/start of March.
The competition was tense as pairs of teams battled it out to win qualification matches and earn win points to advance up the rankings.
At the conclusion of the qualification matches, teams are ranked in order for alliance selection.
Alliance selection is where teams form alliances of 2 to compete together during elimination matches.
The teams line up in order, and the first seeded team can select their top choice.
This team can either accept the offer, or, more dramatically, decline it.
In the event of the latter, this team can now no longer be picked by anyone above them, and must become their own alliance captain by choosing a team ranked lower than them.
For example, if the first seed picked the fourth seed, the fourth seed could accept the offer and form the first alliance, or decline the offer, in which case the fourth seed could not be picked by the second or third seed, and would have to wait to a pick a team beneath them.
Meanwhile, the first seed would then proceed to select a different team.
In some cases, the selection is easy and there are very few rejections, however in others, there are lots of rejections and teams have to carefully calculate how to go about their choices.
In the end, it all boiled down to the finals match, in which the two alliances were very closely matched.
In the end, it was the blue alliance who managed to take the win – the red alliance was disqualified for interacting with the positive multiplier corner within the final 15 seconds of the match, during which it is a protected zone making this activity illegal.
As well as these tournament champions, there were also a variety of other awards handed out, such as for the quality of engineering notebook, interview, and innovation.
Overall, it was a fantastic way to kick off the season; well done to all the teams who competed and thank you very much to JWS for hosting the event.
